Month: June 2021

Guest Art Teacher Feature: Mrs. Perry

A Creative Life, art techniques, Artist interviews and profiles, artistic inspirations, creative thinking, drawing as thinking, Guest Teacher Feature, life of the mind, mental health, On Looking At Odditorium, visual thinking

I’ve recently made a childrens book about looking at art. I think of my book as a resource book about observational skills for use by teachers and parents.

Which means as I created my On Looking At Odditorium book I also spent a lot of time thinking of the teachers, professors and other helpful adults who have been prominent in my own creative life.

So I’ve decided to guest feature teachers on my blog now and then.

The first teacher to be featured is Sami Perry from Mrs Perry’s Art Studio. Here’s our conversation:

https://mrsperrysartstudio.com/

Clancy: Hi Mrs Perry thanks for being here! What are you up to these days?

Mrs Perry: My crazy thought is to provide all 1879 Elementary schools in Washington State with 18 SEL/ART lessons for free. The SEL/ART lessons can be accessed for free through Mrs Perry’s Art Studio online library.

Clancy: Oooh! Ambitious! But wait a minute what’s SEL?

Mrs. Perry: SEL stands for Social Emotional Learning. With the release of ARP Funding -American Rescue Plan Funding- millions of dollars have been allocated to the school districts. I have been attending ARP webinars and listening to ARP podcasts. Every webinar and podcast I listen to states clearly the importance of covid recovery. They highly recommend SEL – Social Emotional Learning.

Turns out ART is all about SEL. I have been working with East Farms School Counselor, Savannah Maxwell. We are developing a SEL/ART program to address the issues students are experiencing due to the pandemic. We are developing the program for East Farms students but in addition we are adding 18 SEL/ART lessons to Mrs Perry’s Art Studio.

Creating art teaches innovation, problem solving, focus and perseverance. Perhaps more importantly, art helps students express emotion in a meaningful and positive way.

Clancy: Oh yes! I totally agree with you and I use art making as an emotional health tool in my own daily studio practice! My studio is in Western Washington you said your art studio is based in Washington state too is that right? What percentage of the schools here in Washington have art teachers on staff?

Mrs Perry: Yes, I’m on the East side of Washington state in Spokane. Only 7% of Washington Schools have an in house art instructor. In most cases if Elementary students get art it’s provided by the teachers. Mrs Perry’s Art Studio provides fine art lessons teaching OSPI art standards and most lessons can be integrated with student curriculum all designed to bring fine art to every elementary students, making it easy and convenient for the teachers, no prep, just a click of a button.

Clancy: Oh this is a wonderful project! Everyone needs art in their lives no matter how young or old so I think this is great that you’re making it so easy! But what about the art supplies needed for your lessons?

Mrs Perry: No art supplies are required, only pencil and paper is needed for every art project.

Clancy: Keeping the art supply needs simple is a great way to make learning something about art easier for everyone. There’s got to be a lot of pressure currently on teachers and students with the pandemic and distance learning. Doesn’t that add to the need for SEL?

Mrs Perry: Even though the teachers already address SEL daily in their classrooms, teachers are feeling more pressure and overwhelmed with another program to learn. Savannah and I have created the 18 lessons to benefit teachers and the students. SEL/ ART lessons are provided with a click of a button, and a big bonus, no prep.

Clancy: We’re all in this together aren’t we? Hey, can we see one of your lessons and see the kind of thing you’re doing?

Mrs Perry: How about a Monstar? It’s one of the 3 free lessons I offer:
Little Monstar is so much fun and teaches art standard for K-1st grades.
Zentangle Sea Turtle is loved by 2nd-3rd grade.
Zentangle Tree teaches art techniques and art standards for 4th-6th grade.
Zentangle is drawing style that uses patterns to help students with focus and concentration.

Here are some links:
“Little Monstar” – https://mrsperrysartstudio.com/free-video-1/

Sea Turtle – Part I- https://mrsperrysartstudio.com/free-video-3/

Sea Turtle – Part II- https://mrsperrysartstudio.com/free-video-5/

Zentangle Tree – Part I- https://mrsperrysartstudio.com/free-video-4/

Zentagle Tree – Part II –https://mrsperrysartstudio.com/free-video-6/

Art lessons are divided into 2 parts to better accommodate class time availability.

Clancy: Wow! Thank you for your generosity!! These look like such fun!!
What’s your website address again and what else can you tell us about your art lessons?

Mrs Perry: Mrs Perry’s Art Studio is a professional online art lesson annual subscription, similar to Mystery Science, but teaches fine art. It is an opportunity to bring art lessons to a school at a fraction of the cost of hiring an art teacher and it makes art lessons easily accessible to all staff and students! Here’s my website
https://mrsperrysartstudio.com/

The art lessons were created by me – Sami Perry – a local Spokane Washington Artist and the Resident Artist at East Farms S.T.E.A.M. Magnet School, this flagship program has solidified the “A” for ART!

Each lesson within the online library focuses on developing imagination and creativity while building self esteem. The O.S.P.I. educational art standards are embedded within the art curriculum and is presented in a simple and easy to follow instructional medley complete with supply lists.

Mrs Perry’s Art Studio is a fine arts lesson library filled with over 50 lessons (and growing) for grades K-6th. It’s fun, it’s inspiring and it’s educational. For even more entertainment Mrs Perry’s dog Beulah teaches the art vocabulary. She’s a hit and kids listen!

Clancy: A dog!! I love dogs!! Can we see a picture of Beulah on your website?

Mrs Perry: Yes, here’s Beulah.

Clancy: Oh, what a handsome dog!!!Thanks so much for sharing all of this with me! I wish you the best of luck!! Do you have a favorite quote you’d like to leave us with?

Mrs Perry: “Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like someone else” ~ Sydney Gurewitz Clemens

On Looking at Odditorium

A Creative Life, art exhibit, art gallery, artist book, artistic inspirations, author illustrator, book design and layout, books, children's book, creative thinking, ebook, household surrealism, Odditorium, On Looking At Odditorium, printed books, public art, published art, sketchbook, Sustainable creativity, visual thinking, words and pictures, writing, writing and illustrating

To my awareness there aren’t many books for children that talk about looking at an artist’s exhibit whether the fine art is in a book or on walls.

A child looking at a painting by Sue Clancy in the Caplan Art Designs gallery

I think looking at a book of fine art is similar to looking at a wordless picture book. Looking at one artist’s series of paintings on a gallery wall is like a wordless book too. But looking at fine art, while there are similarities to wordless picture books, it is also different; a collection of fine art often refers to the feelings and lived experiences of the artist in addition to any visual story there may be within the artwork itself.

So I’ve been lucky enough to work with Storyberries to create a childrens book On Looking At Odditorium that I hope will help kids enjoy looking at artwork and be able to speculate about the artist’s thinking.

Towards that end I created cartoon drawings of myself so they could take a trip (or tour) through a book of my Odditorium fine art exhibit and explain what I was thinking and how I created each painting.

Here’s a closer look at all of the avatar drawings. In many of my childrens books on Storyberries.com there’s a photo of me wearing a sweater. For consistency sake I drew myself in a sweater pointing this way and that.

Below are several sample pages from On Looking At Odditorium. You can see the avatar and a speech bubble on each page.

I want to encourage imaginations so in the book I try to both show and tell what using imagination is like.

For a childrens book I didn’t want to get too technical about art materials and methods but I did want to share something about them. I wanted to share especially when the materials and methods directly interacted with my imagination.

Below is a look at the book layout so you can see the little avatars on tour across a page spread.

The adult version of my Odditorium exhibit coffee table book does not have the avatar or descriptions. Here’s what the cover of the adult book looks like.

https://www.blurb.com/b/10698335-odditorium

And here’s the childrens book version titled “On Looking At Odditorium“. The cover design is very similar to the adult book on purpose – to emphasize that anyone of any age can look at art. The layout inside this book is different as is the kind of paper for the printed books. I wanted paper likely to withstand children’s hands.

https://www.blurb.com/b/10758158-on-looking-at-odditorium

Storyberries has a extra special ebook edition that went live within hours of this post. And I love the nesting specialness of this project: it’s a fine art exhibit called Odditorium at Burnt Bridge Cellars via Caplan Art Designs that has a companion exhibit book titled Odditorium. The Odditorium exhibit book then has a companion childrens book version titled On Looking At Odditorium. Then the special ebook on Storyberries – which you can see here for free – about looking at On Looking At Odditorium! Here’s what the Storyberries ebook version looks like at the top…

https://www.storyberries.com/bedtime-stories-odditorium-free-art-books-for-kids/

Did you get all the nesting nuances to this project? I’ve hopefully laid it all out clearly on my portfolio page about this project… but even if no one besides me sees the nesting qualities – thinking about it in this interlocking way served to help me construct it all – my main point is for people to have fun.

Needless to say it’s been a very busy week. There’s been food, some of it tasty and blog-worthy, but I was tired and just ate it without photos or noting recipes.

Also due to busy-ness not much was done on my new crocodile project mentioned last post. But I have kept up my sketchbook activities and reading books of an evening. Sketching and reading are like breathing.

So I’ll not promise anything specific for next Monday… but there will be something. Hopefully, something that encourages your own creative life or is at least entertaining for you.

Till next time – have a good week looking at stuff.

Of beermats, bears, books, poems, crocodiles and garden garlic scapes

A Creative Life, animals in art, art exhibit, art gallery, art techniques, artistic inspirations, books, children's book, creative thinking, drinks in art, fine art, functional art, household surrealism, life of the mind, poetry, travel art and writing, travelogue, visual story, visual thinking, whimsical art, words and pictures, writing and illustrating

“Warning” by Jenny Joseph is one of my favorite poems. I particularly like these lines “…and hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes…”. But I hadn’t read that poem or thought of it in a while (you can see the entire poem here).

Earlier this month I received the prospectus for a “reclaimed canvas” art exhibit upcoming at the Aurora Gallery. (This is the project I hinted at in my last post.) The Reclaimed Canvas is an art exhibit asking the gallery artists to paint on something not normally used as a canvas or surface for painting. So I began this new project by rummaging around my studio for a not-typical thing to paint on. Look what I found – boxes of pens, pencils and beermats!

Suddenly I remembered the poem “Warning” by Jenny Joseph…. and had a good chuckle at myself. Of course I reread the poem and laughed some more.

Before we visited, and later moved to, the Pacific Northwest I didn’t think I liked beer. But here in the Pacific Northwest there are locally owned microbreweries and the beer is worth taste testing – and both the brewpubs and the beers often reflect the region in which they’re located. So having a beer in one of the microbrew pubs includes a bit of regional history and personal stories. Often there’s beautiful scenery too. Oh, and did I mention that the beer tastes surprisingly good?

As I looked through my collection of beermats in my pencil box I thought of poetry and word play in general. I also remembered our various visits to the brewpubs whose beermats I had in hand. I evaluated the qualities of the beermats themselves as a possible canvas for a painting.

Here’s the beermat I chose for my new painting project – the first photo shows the front of the beermat and then the next photo shows the back of it.

Bouy Beer is in Astoria Oregon and the brewpub sits right on the water. When entering the pub you can walk over a large glass floor. Through the glass floor you can often see the sea lions lounging on the pier beneath. We’ve enjoyed sitting in the pub on the waters edge, watching ships and marine wildlife. Sitting there, with a beer, I’m aware of the intimate connection this one spot has with the entire world: international ships come and go as do migrating whales, geese and sea lions. I love the way it is both a unique place with it’s own regional quirks and yet it openly, joyfully, participates in a wider world. It’s a wonderful reminder that one can be fully ones particular self while also being fully within, and open to, a diverse world. The food menu at Buoy Beer is also an enchanting fusion of world cuisines… but I dangerously digress. I have so many good memories of this particular pub and look forward to each visit. Oh, and they brew really good beers!

Anyway, for an animal character to use in my painting on the Buoy Beer beermat I thought about having a sea lion drinking beer, a great blue heron drinking beer, a whale drinking…. eventually, after a number of sketchbook drawings, I settled on the character of a bear. My main reasons for choosing a bear is that I could do a wordplay title for the finished art … but also the shape of bear, physically, could evoke the feeling and the relaxing-into-hybernation pose that I associate with the flavor of one of my favorite beers when it’s seasonally available at Bouy Beer.

Here’s a sketch I did when exploring my thoughts.

And below is the painting I did on one of the 4 inch round coasters I had collected during one of our trips to Bouy Beer (which I kept in a pencil box with the rest of my beermat collection – 🤣). I painted on the coaster with gouache and have titled it …wait for it… “Bear, Matt”

The back of my “Bear, Matt” painting has the title and other data written by hand.

I did seal the beermat with a clear primer before I began painting on it and when my painting was finished and dry I varnished the artwork. Plus the art will likely be framed at the Aurora Gallery. So what was once an ephemeral throw-away object now will potentially last quite a bit longer.

I think of this new project as fitting in with my recent household surrealism thinking: a mundane object was thought about in a new way.

With this thought, given my sense of humor, I simply couldn’t resist turning my original painting “Bear, Matt” back into ephemeral beermats. So on my Zazzle shop I made round paper coasters – beermats – that are copies or art prints of my original “Bear, Matt” artwork! The back of these printed coasters is blank. That’s one way you can tell the copy from the original. You can get these here.

https://www.zazzle.com/bear_matt_paper_coaster-256396249111967834

After finishing “Bear, Matt” and delivering the original to the Aurora Galley a few days ago – I visited, in masked-up person, another favorite local independent bookstore called Daedalus Books. This bookstore is especially alluring for me with my interests in literature, fine art, poetry, books about books, artist books, literary studies, culture, history and philosophy. You can see how tempting it was… in the photo below is my book haul!

Another new project in progress contains a crocodile. In the photo below you can see my orange poetry sketchbook and my crocodile poem written by hand. Also in the photo is a binder that holds my drawing attempts, book dummies and poem drafts. Yes, I’m working on a new children’s book. I plan to update this blog over the coming weeks with my progress…

My spouse’s garden has lots of garlic scapes and some radish greens so the memorable meal this week was the pasta with radish greens and garlic scapes recipe below!

Hope your week is full of fun memories and your own collections of beermats, pencils and pens!

See you next Monday?

Odditorium exhibit, lots of books and a sandwich technique

A Creative Life, art exhibit, art gallery, art techniques, artist book, artistic inspirations, books, fine art, illustrated gifts, life of the mind, mental health, Odditorium, printed books, sketchbook, Sustainable creativity, whimsical art, words and pictures, writing, writing and illustrating

Last week I took 3 boxes containing all of my Odditorium fineart into Burnt Bridge Cellars where it will be through the end of July. Everything I’ve done over the last year is now in the capable hands of the winery and the Caplan Art Designs art gallery!

My spouse took this photo as I paused with one of the boxes on my way into the back patio door of the winery.

Due to our state’s Covid19 protocols reservations are needed for drinking and eating indoors or outdoors at the winery. Masked people are welcome to drop in to see the fine art and buy bottles or growlers of wines. When not seated masks are required.

Reservations can be made here:
https://www.burntbridgecellars.com/

(I see that I have new followers to this blog – welcome! – to catch you up to date more photos and info about this project, the art and access to the artistbooks is here https://sueclancy.com/portfolio/odditorium/)

While not exactly a full art opening  the winery took reservations for a special Friday night dinner: marinated salmon or chicken sate by Class Cooking and of course one could sit and enjoy a variety of wines!! Masks can be removed when seated it’s just when walking about that they’re needed.

Friday night there was live music outside on the winery patio. And you could go inside to see my fineart and artistbooks then you could go outside to hear the music or vice versa.

These photos below are a look at my Odditorium artexhibit on the winery walls before people came (there are more photos here).

Below is a photo of the artist books that are in the basket in the photo above.

And my green dragon bookplates did come in time!! I had hoped in my last post to sign a few of the bookplates for the exhibit in case someone wanted one in one of my books.

Anyway, I was very aware all week that in the best of times and conditions I don’t hear well. Add the masks worn sensibly during a fading pandemic and lip reading isn’t an option either. So I made the decision to stay home even though I could have made a reservation at Burnt Bridge Cellars and spent at least some time at the winery during the first Friday my Odditorium art exhibit was  available.

But I know myself and I know that if I saw someone looking at my art I’d want to pop up from my seat put my mask on and try to talk with them and try to hear what they’d say even knowing it wouldn’t be likely…. so I just chose to not put myself in that situation.

While it was a sensible decision I still had some upset feelings about it. So I worked on remembering this 👇

Bookstores and libraries have often been my places of consolation. So my spouse and I went and had our first in-person visit to a local independent bookstore Vintage Books ! We’ve both been buying online from Vintage Books for a year now…but the impulse buying when indiebookstore shopping in person can’t be beat!!
https://www.vintage-books.net/

Here’s a selfie I snapped inside the store. At the time we went there were only two other customers and two store employees. We were all spread out throughout the store. It was silent (at least to my perception) except for one of the two store cats who sat up when I neared the shelf where she lay and said “meow”. Vintage Books has both new and used books so the store smelled like book heaven even though my mask. I loved the sights of the colorful book spines and book covers displayed on shelves from floor to ceiling. The staff write handwritten notes about books and I enjoy seeing the various handwriting styles in various places on the shelves. There were multiple spaces where books from different topics/genres had been collected together with staff comments like “if you like the topic in this book then you may like these too” – and that’s a sure way to get me to impulse buy! 🤣

Here’s a photo of my book haul.

Then after we got home I used my usual “how to pick a book” method. I’ve described it in Another Sketchbook and also included it on this coffee mug in my Zazzle shop.

https://www.zazzle.com/how_to_pick_a_fun_book_to_read_mug-168374730790857937
https://www.zazzle.com/how_to_pick_a_fun_book_to_read_mug-168374730790857937

It felt so good to have an extended length of time reading!!

Another soul satisfying restorative was finding that my order from Paperblanks came!!! (https://www.paperblanks.com/en/) Yippee!!! I buy blank books 5 or 6 at a time because it gives me the joyous feeling that I can write with impunity. I can draw with abandon. I can liberally spread the sunshine of my imagination. I can run around with my pen… I can…I can… I can…❤❤❤❤🖋🖋🖋☕☕❤❤❤❤

So this weekend I immersed myself in my books, I dipped into novels like a diver into a swimming pool. I also swam freely in my new orange poetry sketchbook book (mentioned last post). The orange book was the last unused book from my last order-of-5 books. Whenever I get to the last few books I order more immediately.

Several meals this week were quick sandwiches: cream cheese, various vegetables chopped up and some spring greens on lavash bread rolled up. A rolled sandwich only requires one hand to hold it which leaves the other hand free to hold a book! The Atoria Lavash are some of the best I’ve tasted and they ship directly from the bakery! Anyway here’s a link to the sandwich rolling technique https://www.atoriasfamilybakery.com/wrap-like-a-pro/

While my Odditorium exhibit will run through the end of July in subsequent posts I’m going to turn this blog towards new projects. I’ve already started new fine art that continues this Odditorium theme. The new art will be destined for exhibit in September. There’s also the children’s book version of my Odditorium exhibit book still to be released. So periodically on this blog I will probably return to this theme. But I’ve also got a different project in progress that I also want to share with you…

More about that next Monday. I hope your week is a good one!